Cheyne Suker dot com

Who Will Bail You Out?

That is the simple and hard truth. Most people do not want to deal with this kind of responsibility anymore so they look for the jobs (largely found in disastrously run government offices) that guarantee to care for them until their dying day.

While the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece & Spain) struggle to come to terms with their financial reality, that is the most basic financial principal that you need to keep in mind. No one will bail you out. Everything else can (and should!) be built upon that core understanding. As the homeless father turned multimillionaire Wall Street executive and author Chris Gardner explains, “the cavalry ain’t coming.” There are no taxpayers that will come to rescue you out of your poor financial decisions. The trouble here, is that the government does have taxpayers and other countries that don’t want to see them struggle.

Greece was first to get a bailout from Germany and its safe to say that it didn’t go very well. Citizens started protesting and rioting because the government had to cut back on their lifestyle that they haven’t been able to afford for years. “The numbers don’t matter…Pay me!” Their newly elected leaders are going back to Germany & the European Union to restructure the terms of the bailout already. It hasn’t even been six months!

Next up? Spain. Their ratio of debt to their GDP output is 68%. The good news is that this is less than Greece’s number, which was up near 140%. The bad news is that the United States’s debt to GDP ratio is 102%. Despite the obviously concerning numbers, our government seems incapable of cutting costs, just like Greece and Spain. No worries though…the higher ratio is A-OK because the U.S. controls that value of that currency and we can just print more money. Stellar system. Really.

So, bringing it all back, unless you have your own taxpayers or are daring enough to print more money, no one is bailing you out. Aside from your family, no one really cares if you’re in financial trouble because that’s life. The sooner you come to terms with having to live life without a cavalry coming to save you, the better off you will be. Any strategy that helps a man go from homeless on the street to head honcho on Wall Street is probably worth applying to your life.